financing

Although more a record-keeper than a true assistant, Pageonce's ad-supported Personal Assistant app gives you the tools to view all your online accounts in one centralized location. Sure, you'll have to be comfortable storing all your passwords on your phone, but if you are, you'll find yourself relying on it to get all your details in a glance.

After adding accounts through an assisted browsing process, you'll be able to view a history of your banking transactions, stock portfolio, social commitments, and friends' status updates from a slew of social networks, e-mail accounts, and shopping services, … Read more

J and L Financial Planner Professional is a powerful program that allows users to predict how certain financial events will affect them in the future. Although the program is jam-packed with features, its overwhelming interface makes it a little hard to get used to.

The trial version of the program allows users to view a sample account, and the first screen of the interface shows three graphs representing net worth and incoming and outgoing funds. The rest of the interface is cluttered with tabs, buttons, and drop-down menus. Users need to take a deep breath and resign themselves to clicking … Read more

Checkbook offers users a chance to keep their finances in order with this simple program. Utilizing a familiar design and garnering fantastic results, this may be a dream come true for those who dread balancing their checkbooks each month.

The program's interface is reminiscent of the inside of a checkbook. The entry fields are intuitive and should not be a problem to navigate. There is also an excellent step-by-step Help file to guide anyone who is not perfectly comfortable with the program. Balancing our books was delightfully simple. All we had to do was fill in the appropriate fields … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Dell's second-quarter earnings were down 23 percent from a year ago, but topped Wall Street estimates. The company continues to bet on an enterprise refresh cycle in 2010 and sees ongoing signs of stabilization.

The company on Thursday reported earnings of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, on revenue of $12.76 billion, down 22 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $12.6 billion.

Like Hewlett-Packard, Dell reported that sales stabilized sequentially from the first quarter, … Read more

Farsight Calculator is a versatile application that can be used for algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and other computations. Users have the option to program functions into the calculator and customize settings for personalized usage.

Though Farsight Calculator is designed primarily for algebraic calculations, under the Tools menu, users can access the Finance Box for computing financial information and date calculations. It also offers a Unit Converter that converts distance, volume, temperature, area, time, and more. These features make Farsight Calculator a useful tool for users in a variety of professions. The interface is small enough to stay out of your way … Read more

Was there an unexpected rush of Facebook employees looking to cash out their stock? Yes, says BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy, who said that the $100 million buyback orchestrated by investor Digital Sky Technologies has been oversubscribed. Which means that a fair number of employees have been looking to cash out some stock even though it may be worth far more down the road when (and if) Facebook goes public. It's the sort of thing that would've left pre-IPO Googlers feeling awfully sheepish.

But what's more surprising, Lacy found, is that the high demand for Facebook cash-outs seems … Read more

If you're looking to bankroll a green-business revolution, boring old banks and the government are looking just as effective as flashy venture capitalists.

Tech investors from Silicon Valley to Shanghai are betting billions of dollars on breakthrough green technologies, with many hoping to repeat the success of Google or Amazon in the energy industry. It's a shift that has helped create the buzz around clean energy among entrepreneurs, politicians, and in industry.

But despite a lot of attention on high-risk ventures, experts say the financing engine for the clean-energy economy needs to be a hybrid, drawing on both venture capital and on more staid funding sources, many of which are hamstrung by the global capital crunch.

"Venture capitalists are critically important for starting new innovations and getting businesses incubated. But what hasn't happened to date is getting large-scale capital to help bring those businesses to commercial scale," said Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank and expert on green jobs. "We need the policies and financial mechanisms to turn early start-up companies into global powerhouses."

Using a baseball analogy, venture capital is all about hitting home runs--one company could deliver 10 or 20 times the initial investment within five or seven years. To get that, venture capitalists traditionally seek out companies that have a proprietary technology that sets them apart from the pack.

But many businesses that create green collar jobs are not a clean fit with that high-risk, high-reward model. Although they still require financing, companies that manufacture wind turbines or do home energy audits, for example, don't require technology breakthroughs.

"If you care about investing in clean energy for job growth, venture capital may not be the way to go," said one investor who requested anonymity. "Government spending should be doing more to support service industries."

Government funding could, for example, be used to retrain tradesmen to retrofit commercial buildings to be more efficient, he said. Meanwhile, large-scale energy projects, such as a solar power plant, rely largely on bank-issued debt and, increasingly, government loan programs.

Running the numbers There are signs that entrepreneurs and investors in the green-tech field are getting a better grip on how to finance their ideas. The key is to pull money from different sources at different stages, say investors. … Read more

The economy is in a major state of flux right now. Although unemployment is still on the rise, the stock market is on the rise too as of late.

If you're one of those people trying to make sense of the markets, you might be happy to know that instead of jumping from site to site to get all your financial information, you can simply add some gadgets to your iGoogle home page. From currencies to commodities, iGoogle gadgets will satisfy any desire.

Commodities Market If you're looking to find a way to easily track the price of oil and natural gas, the Commodities Market gadget is for you. The gadget displays the major commodity indexes, including crude oil, natural gas, and even coffee. You'll see the price fluctuate as market factors change throughout the day. It's a great way to stay up on the commodity market.

Company Overview After you install Company Overview, you can input any company's ticker symbol and see an overview of its operation. You can also get company news, see key financial ratios, check out its financial performance, and even see who the company's key managers are. If you want to listen in on quarterly earnings calls, you can find all the information you need to join those calls in this gadget. Check it out.… Read more

In a sign of the difficulty financing solar, commercial installer Borrego Solar said on Monday it has taken in $30 million from an outside investor to fund new projects.

With the additional funding, Borrego Solar will now be able to offer purchase power agreements to companies and government organizations.

In that model, a school or business does not buy the actual solar equipment but instead purchases the power it generates at a fixed rate over 20 or 25 years. The panels themselves are owned and maintained by a third party, such as an installer or a financing company.

Taiwanese metal … Read more